Weekly street newspaper The Big Issue has built its digital readership from “pretty much zero” to 1.5 million a month, its editor-in-chief has said, as the title sees to expand its online presence.
Although the street vendors who sell The Big Issue up and down Britain continue to contribute most of the outlet’s income, it is now publishing much more daily news online as part of a bid to increase engagement across the week.
And while it has kept its core mission of helping people in or at risk of homelessness, the title now sets out a far wider goal of helping “the millions of people in the UK living in poverty”.
Homelessness does not come up on The Big Issue website’s “About Us” page, but the word “poverty” appears seven times.
Paul McNamee, who has been editor of The Big Issue since 2011, told Press Gazette that change “was absolutely a decision”.
“Obviously, we are still working, at core, for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in the immediate moment, and we can be there for them.
“But with the sheer volume of people, the three million people who are in poverty or at risk of extreme poverty in Britain — and so many of those children — we knew that we had to try and do something to serve these people and do something about endemic poverty. Because if you don’t then the homelessness figures will just keep going up.”
But 3,700 homeless or at-risk Big Issue vendors continue to sell the magazine, buying each copy from the company for £2 and selling it on for £4 (or £4.50 at Christmas).
Big Issue vendors collectively earned £4m from sales in 2023, according to the Big Issue Group’s most recent annual report. The Big Issue Company Limited’s most recent Companies House filings, for the year ending 26 March 2023, recorded profit before tax of £411,000, up from £238,000 the year before.
According to its accounts the business turned over nearly £6.2m across the period, of which 55% was from magazine sales, 12% subscriptions and sponsorship, 8% advertising and 7% “custom publishing” (i.e. sponsored content).
McNamee, who was last month named politics and current affairs editor of the year at the British Society of Magazine Editors Awards, is very clear that The Big Issue seeks to make a profit — even if that profit isall reinvested back into the company.
“It’s a social enterprise — but not a charity. It’s important that this is known: Big Issue is not a charity… We are a business. I, as an editor, every week have to think: ‘What the fuck am I going to do to make this magazine so people buy it?’ Because if we don’t, we’re on a very sticky wicket!”
‘The idea with digital is people see what we’re doing and can respond quickly’
In 2021, as The Big Issue’s digital shift was beginning, McNamee told Press Gazette that the investment was a necessity because if something like the pandemic were to happen again “we couldn’t rely on goodwill of people – we had to find a different way to support the business”.
In September 2023 The Big Issue appointed Ryan Butcher, the former news editor of Pink News and editor of Indy100, to be its news and digital editor.
McNamee said: “The idea with digital, I think, is that people see what we’re doing and can respond quite quickly to the activism within the journalism online…
“So perhaps people still think of The Big Issue as a street paper — which we are, of course, and that’s our foundational core — but we have to be seen, I think, much more as a change-making digital proposition.”
Typical coverage on the Big Issue website recently has included coverage of Labour’s plans on the two-child benefit cap, plans to build more homes and assisted dying. The site also maintains evergreen content on topics like what to do if you see someone sleeping rough in your neighbourhood.
In the last year the business has been focusing on building an engaged audience, which McNamee said was “really key, to my mind, to how we maintain growth”. Efforts in this area have included the launch of a paid membership scheme separate from The Big Issue’s subscriptions and a series of “Community Roadshows” that see the editorial team move to cities around the UK for a week and hold open door drop-in events.
McNamee said social media had become “a declining force” for driving traffic to The Big Issue.
“It is still useful, but it’s not as useful as it was…. Twitter used to drive a lot of interaction, it doesn’t anymore. Instagram’s still useful for us, because it allows people to see what we’re about. Facebook less so.”
Instead search engine optimisation, he said, had become “very important”, with The Big Issue developing Google authority on topics like the Department for Work and Pensions and the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for people with long-term health conditions or disabilities. (McNamee told Press Gazette in 2021 that he wanted to make bigissue.com the “place of first choice” for activism, housing, employment, environment and social justice news and analysis.)
The site has done investigations on behalf of people who had been “terribly treated” by the DWP over PIP payments, McNamee said, and “the more we talked about it, the more people came, and the more people came, the wider the story became”.
The mission-driven focus has meant “people are coming now [to the Big Issue website] because they want to read and they want to interact with the stories, and they want to feel that they’re learning something”.
Readers are also more likely to stay and read multiple things while visiting than they were previously, which McNamee credited to Butcher and his team. The site now gets around 1.5 million unique visitors a month, he said, which was up from “pretty much zero a few years ago”.
The site earns some programmatic ad revenue — “not massive, but useful”, McNamee said — but drives much of its ad revenue from advertorials and commercial deals.
“Rather than traditional, standard advertising… we found that, because The Big Issue as a brand has good trust and respectability, organisations want some of that.”
‘One of my key aims was to make people want to buy the magazine for what was in it’
During the pandemic The Big Issue began selling far more subscriptions as vendors were required to stay at home. Having hit a height of around 10,000, the number had declined to 5,400 as of the company’s 2023 annual report.
“It’s a useful revenue raiser for any publisher so that there’s guaranteed cash, but we have to make sure that we don’t make the subscriptions much more attractive than the street sales,” McNamee said. “So there’s a kind of double challenge for the subscription team.”
The title has attempted to adapt by allowing subscribers to nominate specific vendors to receive half the money from their subscriptions, which cost £152.99 for a year in print or £126.99 for a year of digital-only access.
The most recent magazine ABC figures for The Big Issue put its average circulation at 49,026 per issue, but McNamee said that in December that spikes to 250,000 or 300,000.
This December’s issues have so far included a special commemorating the 40th anniversary of WHAM!’s “Last Christmas” and a cover about pets. (“Pets at Christmas play very well,” McNamee said.)
It also has an interview with James Corden and Ruth Jones talking about the new Christmas special of BBC comedy Gavin and Stacey.
McNamee said of his approach: “You hook them in with the cover, then you hit them with the hard stuff… When I took over as editor a number of years ago, one of my key, driving aims was to make people want to buy the magazine for what is in it, not because they feel guilty.”
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